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Life with Gracie

Less than 24 hours after little Tripp Halstead passed away, his mother somehow still managed to be gracious. We spoke only a minute or so in which time she could only say—through tears—that she and Tripp’s dad, Bill, weren’t talking to others just yet. It made perfect sense. There are no words. Tripp, who survived a traumatic brain injury after a tree limb fell on him five...

A week from now, City of Refuge will host its fifth annual Refuge Run, a 5K and 10K trek across Atlanta’s Westside that organizers hope will help improve the lives of people living on the fringes. Every step we take on their behalf, they will be able to walk across a graduation stage; enter a job interview with confidence; buy a home or all of the above, most likely for the first time in...

Any time now, Tanvi Lonkar will begin work capturing the faces of South American and European women on canvas, hopefully, for the world to see. She will first study their culture, then zero in on women’s history. If at all possible, she will interview a woman and then paint a mini drawing that incorporates what she learned to study and hopefully glean more ideas for the final piece. This, the...

In less than a week, Donal Fleming will take a seat along the Atlanta St. Patrick’s parade route in midtown and get his head shaved, a ritual born in 1999 to raise funds for childhood cancer research. The Dunwoody father of two has been doing this now since 2003, the year after his daughter officially completed treatment for Rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer that is found in children...

The wave of high school students walking out of class to protest gun violence and honor the victims of the Parkland, Fla., mass shooting is nothing short of inspirational. If you’re prone to historical flashbacks as I am, you couldn’t help remembering the student led sit-ins of the 1960s and feeling proud that once again our kids are taking the lead and, in this case, standing against...

One day recently, Ronnita Whipple sat in a second-floor conference room at Atlanta’s Savannah College of Art and Design remembering the moment her dream of attending the elite university came to her. She was heading God knows where with her friend and mentor Katherine Hutto, who mentioned the school as a possible place for her after graduation and, well, it stuck in the back of Whipple&rsquo...

For an entire week before she saw “Black Panther,” Debra Shigley had been thrilled by the buzz the movie was receiving about the natural hairstyles the men and women were sporting. Client after client had copies of the Afros, the dreadlocks, the Bantu knots and even the shaved heads they’d seen on the big screen, hoping their stylists could re-create them. “The closest thing...

Funny what we remember about people when they’re gone. In the hours after Billy Graham’s death Wednesday, swollen ankles filled the mind of the Rev. Cameron Madison Alexander. Weeks before Graham’s 1994 Atlanta crusade, the preachers had just wrapped up a meeting in Alexander’s office at Antioch Baptist Church North, when Graham asked to use the restroom. That’s when...

In the days since the Florida school shooting, we’ve heard a lot about assault weapons and the AR-15 in particular. It is the same semi-automatic style weapon Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old suspected shooter, is said to have used to kill 17 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students. It was also the choice of weapon in which 27 were killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School...

A week or so ago, Hannah Lucas and her brother Charlie sat at their kitchen table in Cumming describing the moment the two of them put their heads together to create a digital panic button. Hannah, they said, was in a pretty dark place. Not only was she suffering with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a dysautonomic medical condition that causes her to pass out frequently and...

On most any Friday night, you can find Marcus McAbee on the mat at Karate Atlanta Kennesaw. It isn’t the kind of thing most 16-year-olds will give of their time to after a long week of AP classes, but make no mistake, Marcus isn’t a typical kid. Never has been. Even at just 10, he knew as any good fighter does that sizing up your opponent before the first strike lands is essential to successful...

For a long time, Omar Howard had waited for his answer, but when it came, when he saw the letter from the Georgia Department of Pardons and Parole in his mailbox last week, he couldn’t bring himself to open it. He was just too scared it was another “no,” and he’d grown tired of the rejection. “I didn’t open it,” he said recently. “I kinda pulled it back...

So often we get so caught up in our differences that we forget, whether we admit it or not, that at our core we’re all the same. We all bleed red. We all want to be loved and accepted. We’re all human. Keep that in mind as you read the story of 15-year-old Jemariya Patterson and her mom La Toya, who at just 34 years of age has been battling heart disease now for nearly a decade. Keep in...

In any given school week, Kara Thompson sees as many as 38 students who need her help. Sometimes the need is as simple as a word of encouragement and other times as complicated as finding them a place to stay. As often as she can, she does whatever it takes to fulfill those needs. However and whenever she can. At just 29, Thompson, a site coordinator for Communities In Schools, is little more than...

For the longest time, Empress Rellise accepted other people’s impressions of her. She was, in their eyes, a promiscuous whore, a nymphomaniac. The problem with that is she never had a choice in the matter. No 5-year-old girl, or boy for that matter, ever does. Most 5-year-olds know their address and phone number. They can recognize most letters of the alphabet and they can count. But they don&rsquo...

Clyde Mize was attending a forum last year at Douglass High School, when a handful of teachers stood to lament the proposed shutdown of their elementary school in southwest Atlanta. They weren’t just a school, they were a close-knit community that not only provided classroom instruction but emotional support to students and even supplies and food with money from their own pockets. Moved...

Karin Luise’s Facebook post was simple and straightforward. “From my heart, I want to congratulate Chipper for making it into the Hall of Fame. He was an incredibly talented, passionate ball player. We had quite a ride together from the years in the minor leagues through injuries, the strike, the highs and lows, the best World Series ever … and all the rest.” With those few...

A year after they were introduced as a symbol for the Women’s March, those outrageous pink hats, to my dismay, were back in the news last week. I had hoped I’d seen the last of them, but just as sure as seconds turn to minutes, annual anniversaries come and wouldn’t you know this year marked the first anniversary of both the march and President Donald Trump’s inauguration and...

Eddie Capel stepped into the ring one spring night in 1981 and knew instinctively the mostly Irish crowd, downing glasses of Guinness, wanted to see blood. His opponent, a 19-year-old who was leaner and taller, gave it to them, pummeling Capel to the head hard and often. “He didn’t knock me out but there was indeed plenty of blood,” Capel said recently. “Mine.” That was...

When Connie Venuso arrived in Bangladesh late last year, she’d seen enough refugee camps, cared for enough of their sick to know life in these places can be untenable. That kind of bird’s-eye view allows us to look at people as just “people” and not make any judgments. And so having looked into the faces of thousands of immigrants, Venuso can’t help feeling disheartened...

After 16 years supervising performing arts teachers in Cobb County schools, Melissa Arasi was starting to miss being in the classroom, making music, so much so she’d fancied starting her own chorus. As fate would have it one day in 2012, she discovered a former Walton High School student singing with the Atlanta Gay Men’s Chorus. She sensed, looking at his Facebook posts, that he&rsquo...

On Saturday, the nonprofit I Am B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L. Inc. hosted its annual Pink Pajama Jam, by all measures the biggest slumber party eyes have ever seen. Try and imagine mothers and daughters dressed in their best pink jammies, talking into the night about the things that matter most to them, things that have changed and will change their lives. They have been meeting like this now for years...

Here we go again. President Donald Trump makes incendiary remarks, and the rest of us, well a good majority, are outraged. What did he do this time? What he always does. Open his mouth and let his tongue, ever void of compassion, spew evil, evil, evil, deepening the racial divide. Sadly, there is an undeniable history here, dating back at least to the 1970s, when Trump settled with the Justice Department...

A lot of folks seem to believe that Oprah’s acceptance speech Sunday night at the Golden Globes was a stump speech. Whether it was or not, it certainly fueled speculation about a 2020 run for president. I don’t know about that, but there’s no doubt the Oprah Effect was in full force. By the time she was done wringing our collective hearts, both men and women were on their feet, some...

Any day now, Mark Moore will start work at a local software company doing business-to-business sales, a position that he considers compatible with his work experience and skill set. It might not have happened had he not been spotted last year foraging for food in a dumpster outside Love Beyond Walls,the nonprofit founded by Terence Lester and his wife, Cecilia, four years ago. In another...

This year, according to charity executives and experts, donations from moderate-income people to charities like the United Way will drop dramatically. They’re blaming the new Republican tax overhaul voted into law recently. The changes — particularly doubling the standard deduction we’re allowed — will make it less advantageous for many of us to continue making donations to...

Amanda Davis was remembered Wednesday as the caring, giving person she was. If you had the privilege of meeting her or even if you didn’t, friends and family said, love was the hallmark of her life. That life was celebrated during an hourlong service at Cascade United Methodist Church, where the television news anchor was a member. Davis, 62, died a day after suffering a massive stroke...

For three years, Becky Davis made plans to leave her corporate job at an optical retailer, but each time her exit date arrived, she struggled to take the leap. Next year, she’d tell herself. Then as 2011 faded into the new year, Davis found herself flat on her back in a hospital. Days after undergoing surgery to remove fibroid tumors, she started to feel excruciating pain and nausea. It was...

Like many of us, Genise Shelton was shocked to learn 10 young black girls were missing from their homes in our nation’s capital late last year and with the exception of a handful of local and black news outlets, their stories had been virtually ignored. We now know that much in a viral Instagram post reporting those claims wasn’t completely accurate, but this much remains true: 36.7 percent...

Three years ago, Lisa Earle McLeod was in a huddle with the CEO of a global educational software firm when he asked if she could create a three-day strategy intensive with his team. When they gathered days later, they started naming and claiming their “noble purpose” — being clear about how their products make life better for their customers and why that matters to each employee...

When I left off last week telling you about Jonathan Rapping’s efforts to reform our court system, his wife, Ilham Askia, had just left her job as a first-grade teacher in the Fulton County Public School system to join him in that work. It was an easy choice. While Rapping had extensive experience working in the system, Askia entered from a different place. Like Sean Ramsey, the homeless...

Becoming a single father never figured into Corey McDaniel’s plans. It is not what he would’ve chosen for himself or his sons. But if there’s anything the 48-year-old Stone Mountain dad has learned over the past year and a half, it is that sometimes we don’t get to choose. On May 18, 2016, without warning, McDaniel became the sole parent to his boys, Corey Jr. and Christian...

Back in September, Sean Ramsey stood at the intersection of Central Avenue and Memorial Drive just outside Atlanta Municipal Court holding a sign that read “homeless please help.” For all practical purposes, the 48-year-old may as well have been standing at the corner of Callousness and Indifference. Both were apparently at play when Ramsey was arrested, hauled off to jail and made to...

A week or so ago, this place had all the trappings of a little library, dark bookcases filled with all manner of books, tables and chairs sandwiched between a coffee shop and a neighborhood market. But since my visit to the Carver Neighborhood Market, it has been transformed into a winter wonderland, and right about now, I imagine it bustling with hundreds of parents shopping for the perfect toy for...

Every time you think the last man has fallen, there’s one more to add to the ever-growing list of sexual harassment claims. Let’s see. Last week’s tally yielded journalist Matt Lauer, creator and former host of “A Prairie Home Companion” Garrison Keillor, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, and Reps. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.) and Blake Farenthold (R-Texas). Of course, those are...

On a recent Wednesday evening, a half-dozen members of the gospel group Adoration gathered at the home of its founder Otis Byrd Jr. For nearly two hours, they oohhed and aahhed through vocal exercises before launching into “Hosanna,” “I Need You” and “Glory and Honor” and then spilling out into the night. In less than 24 hours, the 33-year-old was at it again. This...

The window from HIV infection to diagnosis is closing. That was the big news released Tuesday in a teleconference with doctors at the Centers for Disease Control about the agency’s latest Vital Signs report. The estimated median time from infection to diagnosis dropped to three years in 2015 from a high of three years and seven months just four years earlier. That means 85 percent of the estimated...

It being the holiday season when a lot of darkness can creep into our lives or the lives of those we know, La Detra White was in search of a light moment last week, something that might remind her and others that bad moments have a way of turning around for good. She logged onto her computer and began searching through her blog, LiveYourAwesomeLife.Com, the place where she often offers up words...

Chronic fatigue syndrome. For more than two decades, those three words have consumed Liz Burlingame because, well, words mean something. They convey feelings and connote action. They can comfort or cause pain. They can be our best friend or our worst enemy, failing us completely. That’s how Burlingame feels every time she tries to explain this thing that sent her back to her parents’ home...

Mike Weaver was teaching environmental health at the University of South Florida back in 2011 when he posed a question to his students that would change the trajectory of life: How would you like to go serve New Orleans? Of the 44 students who decided to take him up on his offer, only two had previously visited the city. Twenty-five of them had never ventured outside the state of Florida. Twenty-five...

A year after her husband died in May 2013, Angie Racine was still reliving the emotional abuse she says she suffered during their marriage. Like a lot of women, she didn’t consider the secrets he kept — his drug use and money problems — harmful. When he died in May 2013 of colon cancer, Racine found herself processing their years together with a therapist. Two years later, in honor...

At the end of another school day early this month, I met Vincent Gray again in the teacher’s lounge at Druid Hills High School. It was the second time in just two years. The first time, a parent had reached out to tell me what a great teacher Gray is, the kind that not only teaches students facts, but how to think critically. After just six years at Druid Hills, Gray, who earned a master&rsquo...

Next week, Jamilah Najeeullah will sit down to a table surrounded by family and spread with a large turkey, turnip greens, dressing and all the trimmings that make Thanksgiving Day special. And in keeping with family tradition, she and nearly 20 others will take their turn at reciting the thing for which they are most grateful. For 64-year-old Najeeullah, this Habitat home, the first she has ever...

Last month, Georgia Rep. Betty Price set off a national firestorm when she asked a state health official whether people with HIV could be legally quarantined. It wasn’t the first time the word and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, ended up in the same sentence, of course. We heard it a lot in 1985, when 51 percent of respondents in a Los Angeles Times poll supported quarantining AIDS patients...

Tuesday morning, two days after a gunman killed 26 people during a morning church service in Texas, the Rev. Bruce Cook awakened to find himself still shell-shocked like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, Cook, who spent nearly three decades as a parole examiner and chaplain in local jails and state and federal correctional systems and another nine or 10 years counseling crime victims, was...

I might have dismissed her judgment of me out of hand, but she called me sister. Sister as opposed to racist, like so many others. Sister instead of some other rather graphic label. She called me Sister in Christ. Sisters who are polar opposites apparently when it comes to loving your neighbor as yourself. It rang like old news. It wasn’t the first time someone called into question my Christianity...

Less than two years ago, Taylor Duncan’s dream for a baseball league that welcomed teens and adults with autism, Down syndrome and other developmental and intellectual disabilities was just that. A dream. He tried desperately to join one league after another, but each time, he was rejected. Coaches decided he just wasn’t cut out to play ball. The reason, they said, was his autism, which...

This column was published in fall 2017 on the 5th anniversary of his accident as a toddler at day care. Five years ago Oct. 29, Stacy and Bill Halstead’s only child was nearly killed when a tree limb fell on him while he played outside his Winder day care center. And so every Oct. 29 since then, without even looking at the calendar, the stress of that day comes for a visit. “I let myself...

We don’t hear much about women and colorectal cancer, but it happens. And sometimes it happens earlier than even medical professionals would expect. Really early. Hard to believe? Ask attorney Tawny Mack of Atlanta. She was a senior at Georgia Southern University when she first saw blood in her stool and suspected something might be wrong. Mack did all the right things. She immediately saw a...

A lot has been said this past week about President Donald Trump’s telephone call to the widow of La David Johnson, one of four service members killed earlier this month during an ambush in Niger. What he said. What he didn’t say. Listening to the back and forth, the critics and those who came to the president’s defense, I couldn’t help wondering what would’ve been the...